The 2022 International Conference and Summit on Social Justice asked difficult questions and was rewarded with big answers. We outline the themes of the conference and report on some of Stellenbosch University's (SU) contributions to them.
“If we do not address the past it will continue to mug our efforts as we try to lean into the future as we navigate the present."
With these words SU's Law Trust Chair in Social Justice, Prof Thuli Madonsela, threw down the gauntlet at the beginning of the two-day Social Justice International Conference and Summit in October 2022.
The event – comprising the 3rd International Conference on Social Justice on 11 October and the 4th Annual Social Justice Summit on 12 October 2022 – brought together some of the country's most engaged and forward-thinking activists, dignitaries, and academics for an immersion in and exchange of thinking around issues which could mean the difference between a morally stagnant and a potentially progressive future.
The theme of this year's Conference and Summit was “Restitution" and each speaker – hailing from across South Africa to Oxford in the United Kingdom, Freiburg in Germany and Georgetown in the USA – was challenged to interpret the complex and fascinating concept of historical redress.
“While the dictionary definition of restitution is the restoration of something lost or stolen to its proper owner," said Madonsela, “the definition I prefer is placing somebody who has been wrongfully deprived of something, as close as possible to where they would have been if it weren't for that injustice in the first place.
“It is a subtle but important distinction. Because while it is impossible to restore a bygone status quo, it is possible to restore the loss of dignity that injustice has wreaked on the lives of so many."
Working with the School of Data Science and Computational Thinking, her team is considering developing an algorithm to calculate the current socio-economic position of individuals or groups who were affected by injustice if that injustice would not have occurred.
Confluent themes from the Conference and Summit included the challenges and inadequacies of responses to historical dispossession, the importance of acknowledgment and accountability in the process of restitution, the role of educational institutions in creating meaningful change, and the imbalance and intersectionality of the effects of injustice.
The event also reiterated the importance of the Musa Plan for Social Justice, an accelerator programme for social justice named after Palesa Musa, who was imprisoned as a 12-year-old by the Apartheid regime, and who spoke at the Summit.
Parallel breakaway sessions covered the topics of Wealth, Income and Economic Justice; Health and Wellbeing, Family and Social Life; Land, Housing and Spatial Equality; the Impact of Digitalisation and Innovation on the Media, Education and Epistemology; and Public Governance, Democratic Leadership and Access to Justice.
With the COP27 climate summit just a few weeks away, the issue of climate change as a vital consideration in the social justice discourse was also raised. As Angelo Fick of the Auwal Socio-Economic Research Institute eloquently put it: “We are in the middle of the largest extinction event in 65 million years… If we are to move beyond this century as a species in any meaningful way, our imagination on restitution will have to move beyond the merely human. It will have to articulate the human as merely one of many other life forms that need to survive if the human is to survive. And that requires a much more radical interrogation of our notions of restitution, and our notions of social justice."
In her address to the delegates, SU's Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Prof Sibusiso Moyo, read the University's Restitution Statement, which proclaims:
Stellenbosch University (SU) acknowledges its inextricable connection with generations past, present and future… [and] its contribution towards the injustices of the past. For this we have deep regret. We apologise unreservedly to the communities and individuals who were excluded from the historical privileges that SU enjoyed, and we honour the critical Matie voices of the time who would not be silenced.
The second day of the Conference and Summit began with a fiery address by Madonsela who, while excoriating the business sector for its lack of accountability, also cautiously acknowledged SU's Restitution Statement: “Stellenbosch University may have been complicit – and I'm not defending them here, I must acknowledge conflict of interest in saying this as I'm an employee – but it's one of the few institutions that acknowledges their participation in the injustice of the past."
But while the event was a soul-searing and frequently painful exploration of inequality and discrimination, it was also a celebration of individual and institutional efforts to make the world a better place for all.
It heralded former Community Chest CEO Lorenzo Davids as the 2022 Social Justice Champion, who said in his acceptance speech: “This is the land of our dreams. This is the country we want to flourish in. My wish is that one day when I am old, our grandchildren will come to us and say: 'Thank you for helping to build the greatest country on Earth.'"
The evening programme included the launch of SU's Centre for Social Justice – a demonstration of the University's commitment to furthering the steps it took when it appointed Madonsela as its Law Trust Chair in Social Justice in 2016. The following morning Programme Director Cathy Mohlahlana introduced Madonsela as “Director rather than Chair", to thunderous applause.
At the launch of the Centre for Social Justice, Prof Nicola Smit, Dean of the SU Faculty of Law, said this initiative shows the University's commitment to mobilising societal, corporate, and international support resources towards accelerated reduction of poverty and inequality.
As the 2022 Social Justice Conference and Summit concluded, every participant walked away with a better understanding of how the past continues to echo in the present, a deeper appreciation of the work that has been done and still needs to be done, an encouraging sense that this work need not be done alone, and an inspiration to achieve a better future for this planet and its people.
